OHHH YEAH let’s start the year with providing possibly TMI to Internet folks, here’s a meme about furry fandom swiped from online friends!
I'd managed to miss 11 so;
11) I absolutely love conventions despite their *built in* down sides. There's not much of a line between exciting and intense/overwhelming and exhausting; being in this big exciting space which you sunk tons of energy just *getting* to makes it entirely too easy to screw yourself up on self-acceptance, body image, alcohol, food, sleep, hygiene, etc.
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But if I can go all Barbara Ehrenreich for a moment, conventions are what humanity's all about; a big festival atmosphere, planning elaborate stuff for ages, personal involvement in ecstatic experience. That's where furry comes in; there are a lot of places where cons and music festivals can lose their way and furry, being kinda big tent and rooted in smaller scale creations, can't so much. I'm sure there's other conventions that capture that same energy though and honestly we need all of them as a counter to the sort of mass produced, conveniently sorted, profitable joy we're *supposed* to be having in this society.
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@Aphrodite okay so I will gladly stan Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich if you haven’t already read it. She thinks there’s this core festival/audience involvement focus that runs through anything from Greek mystery cults to 60s music festivals to football games (to Nazi rallies on the dark side of things). She posits this cycle where eventually a grassroots thing gets to be an elite thing, and then something else becomes the big audience involvement event.
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@Leucrotta
i’m amazed at how many modern experiences have such strong parallels with classical mystery cults
not a furry but as a hacker c’mon i know full well how much overlap there is in those two communities
would love to know more about the experiences of participants tbh